Peter Paul Rubens

The Flemish baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens, born on the 28th June 1577, died on the 30th May 1640, was the most famous North European artist of his days.

While Peter Paul Rubens completed the realistic tradition of the Flemish and connected with the highly imaginative freedom and the classical subjects of the Italian Renaissance painting, he animated the North European painting again substantially.

The education Peter Paul Rubens reflected the intensive religious quarrel of his age - a fact which should be of determining importance in his artistic career. His father, a passionate Calvinist and Antwerpener lawyer, fled 1568 to Germany to escape religious pursuit, but after his death (1587) the family returned to Antwerp where Peter Paul Rubens was educated as a Catholic and received his early education as an artist and Höfling.

In the Altervon to 21 years Peter Paul Rubens was a master of the painting whose aesthetic and religious opinion made him bet on Italy as the place where his education was to be completed. After his arrival (1600) in Venice he fell under the influence of the luminous colour and the majestic forms of Titian whose work had a constituent influence on the ripe style Rubens.

During 8 years of Peter Paul Rubens (1600-08) as a court painter of the duke of Mantua, he assimilated the apprenticeships of the other Italian Renaissance masters and did (1603) a trip to Spain which a deep influence on the development of the Spanish baroque art had. Peter Paul Rubens also spent a substantial time in Rome where he painted altarpieces for the churches of Santa Croce Di Gerusalemme (1602; now in Hopital you Petit Paris, Grasse, France) and the Chiesa Nuova (1607; now in Musee de Peinture and Sculpture, Grenoble, France), his first masterpieces approved far away.

After the death of his mother Peter Paul Rubens 1608 returned to Antwerp and became fast the dominating artistic figure in the Spanish Netherlands.

In the ripe phase of his career, Peter Paul Rubens explained a vast amount of works either personally, or supervised the representations all areas of the painting and drawing enclosed. As a devout Catholic, Peter Paul Rubens fulfilled his many religious pictures with the emotional tenor of the counterreformation. This aggressively religious position, together with his deep participation in public problems, lent the work of Peter Paul Rubens a conservative and public painting which contrasts substantially with the more private and worldlier pictures of his big Dutch contemporary, Rembrandt. But even if his roots lie in Italian classical art and in the Roman-Catholic dogma, nevertheless, Peter Paul Rubens avoided infertile repetition of academic forms, while he returned a strong fullness and almost raving energy in his works. Quickly growing compositions give glowing colour and light which flickers about limbs and drapes like " the descent of the cross " (1611; Antwerpener cathedral) a typically baroque sense of the movement and noticeable strength.

The phenomenal productiveness of Peter Paul Rubens was interrupted every now and then by diplomatic tasks which to him of his royal patrons, archduchess and archduke Ferdinand Isabella were imposed. Thus Peter Paul Rubens 1625 led the negotiations around the war between the Spanish Netherlands and the Dutch republic to finish and a peace treaty helped (1629-30) between England and Spain to close. Charles I from England was so impressed by the strains Peter Paul Rubens that he ennobled the Flemish painter and instructed to his only surviving cover painting " the allegory of the war and peace " (1629; palace of Whitehall, London).

During the last decade of his life Peter Paul Rubens turned more and more to portraits, genre scenes and sceneries. These later works, how " scenery with the Chateau of Steen " (1636; national gallery, London), do not have any more the worried drama of his former pictures, however, reflect masterly skill in the details and an untiring technical skill. In spite of returning arthritis attacks, he remained in the course of his last years an unusually fertile artist who spent mainly in his Chateau de Steen.